The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method for analyzing online content. In one aspect, the present application relates to evaluating and ranking content creators based on content quality indications from user activity and feedback.
A variety of online communities that are designed to facilitate/enable a community of users to collaboratively generate content. These include forums, file sharing services, collaboratively edited pages such as wikis, and various social media outlets, such as Wikipedia, reddit, FourSquare, Twitter. For example, Wikipedia content is essentially the structured output of a community of self-organized volunteers who have collaboratively written, edited, and published Encyclopedia-style content using underlying design and technologies that are structured or chosen to facilitate a specific output of Encyclopedia-style articles from the community. Another example is reddit, a social media, social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website wherein registered community members can share content, such as text posts or direct links, for evaluation by registered uses who vote submissions with “upvotes” or “downvotes” to organize the posts and determine their ranking and position on the front page of the website. There are also open source software communities in which higher quality contributions, as measured by commits to the project, are given increased influence over the direction of the project. In each of these examples, a platform is provided which enables users to share content to be consumed by other users, but as such communities grow and the volume of contributed content expands, it becomes challenging to measure and weigh individual contributions of users as well as the output they generate. As a result, the existing solutions for efficiently organizing online content and users to improve the online community experience are extremely difficult at a practical level.